DemoGirl

LifesterBlog is a blogging service that allows you to create a customized blog and control the privacy on all of your posts. You can add video from YouTube, photos from Flickr, and books from Amazon. There aren’t very many themes to choose from but you can upload your own image to use as the banner of your blog. You can customize the order of your sidebar widgets and get rid of the ones you don’t want to use. If there’s a certain song you want played while people read your blog you can choose an mp3 to load automatically and readers have the option on shutting it off.  I’m just a little unsure about the name, “LifesterBlog“.  I’ll have to think about that one.  In the mean time, here’s my screencast tour of LifesterBlog:

Flash Demo 5m5s

MySpace News is a news aggregation service that lets MySpace members vote on stories on a scale of 1-5 ( hate it-love it ). The more positive votes the story gets, the more it moves up. There are numerous categories and topics that you can browse through and you can request more to be added as well.

As of now, I don’t see any way for MySpace members to get to MySpace News directly from their account and I could vote on stories without being signed into anything. In the FAQ’s it says that anyone can view the stories but only MySpace members can vote. Possibly the site hasn’t officially launched yet, I’m not sure. MySpace is all about creating your own space so if they add more customization for members, like the ability to create their own news site to share with friends or the ability to post favorite stories to your page, they may have a winner here. Here’s my screencast tour of MySpace News:

Flash Demo 2m21s

Buzzillions is a product review site that helps you find customer reviews based on qualities that are important to you. While searching for a product you can choose what features you want, what dislikes you won’t stand for, and you can compare brands by customers most used keywords. Reviewers can also submit photos to show off the product that they’re reviewing. Here’s my screencast tour of Buzzillions:

Flash Demo 3m12s

Spock is a people search engine with a ton of cool features. The search results are more like mini profiles of people who match your search term. Each person has tags associated with them which are used to make finding them easier. The tags have a drop down menu where you can vote on whether or not you believe the tag to be an accurate match. You can view who else voted and so on.

If you happen to stumble upon your profile, you can easily claim it and add your web pages, photos, tags, location, anything you feel is important to share with the world. They claim to have over 100 million people already indexed and millions more being added every day. Spock is a lot cooler to see then to read about so I was happy when they gave us an invite to give Spock a whirl. Here’s my screencast tour of Spock:

Flash Demo 5m49s

Pandora is a really great internet radio and music discovery site. Users can create multiple radio stations for different types of music, browse through other users shared stations to find new music, and even buy the new music they discovered on Pandora. Yes, that’s right, I said you can pay for this music that Pandora helped you find. If you click on the album cover there are links to iTunes and Amazon. The reason I’m mentioning this is because Pandora, and other internet radio stations, are most likely going to go under because the Copyright Royalty Board has severely increased internet radios royalty responsibility.  Isn’t any credit given for the royalties gained each time a user purchases an album while using Pandora, or any other internet radio site?

I made this screencast to show you all of Pandora’s great features and to show you why Pandora can lead to the purchase of music which may otherwise have gone unnoticed. If you choose to support internet radio, you can read more about the issues here and sign a petition here. Here’s my screencast tour of Pandora:

Flash Demo 5m47s

Funny or Die is a new video sharing site for aspiring and professional comedians to showcase their work. After you upload your video, users can vote if the video’s funny or if it’s lame and should therefore die. The more funny votes you receive, the more you’ll be featured. If you’re voted to “die” one to many times, you’ll be sent to the crypt and will hopefully rethink your career choice.

Funny or Die claims to be a “collaborative effort of people in Silicon Valley and Hollywood” and is home to a great video featuring Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, the Hollywood behind Funny or Die. Here’s my screencast tour of Funny or Die:

Flash Demo 3m24s

Earlier today I decided to give my brain a break and just sit back and let StumbleUpon guide me around the web. I also have to admit I was listening to Styx at the time, please don’t hate me. I have fond memories of my sister and I as kids dancing around the house groovin’ to Styx, or Stynx as some people like to call them.

So there I was, wasting time when I had the urge to record my stumbling and see if I couldn’t edit it to go with the current song that was playing, “Too much time on my hands”. I recorded myself for about 20 minutes and cut it down to about 4 minutes of pure StumbleUpon and Styx magic. And yes, I’m completely sober.

Molly Stumbling to Styx

Particls, formerly Touchstone, is an “alerts platform” which keeps you informed about news that’s important to you in a non-intrusive way. You need to download Particls and tell it what you’re interested in being alerted on by entering in keywords and ranking various results you receive. I know this sounds a bit like LeapTag, which I screencasted yesterday, but it’s not. Particls displays alerts like a news ticker and you simply grab what you like. You also have the option to receive alerts in a pop-up that follows your mouse, sms, email etc. I will say that the mouse alert would most likely make me go bonkers but that’s why they give you options.

Right now Particls is invite only beta but they do have a great screencast overview on their site which is accompanied by the wonderful music of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.

Particls Demo

BlogTalkRadio allows users to create their own talk radio show just by dialing a number. When you sign up you’ll be given a phone number and a pin number. All you need to do is set up your segment (show) by giving a description of what you’ll be discussing and a date and time for the world to tune in. When listeners go to your host page, they’ll see a number they can call you on live during your show. You can choose to speak with them, mute them, or hang up on them. You can also choose to connect with them via IM. You can subscribe to the radio show host feeds so you’ll know whenever there’s a new show.

I decided to make a screencast of BlogTalkRadio after reading this and discovering that it was a bit confusing to get started creating a show and understanding how to make the most out of the tools they provide you with. All in all, I think it’s a really cool service. Here’s my screencast tour of BlogTalkRadio:

Flash Demo 3m29s

Found on: /Message

LeapTag is a browser tool bar add-on that wants to help you find new blogs and websites based on your interests and web browsing habits. You begin by creating tags which represent something you’d normally be interested in, such as screencasts. LeapTag will give you search results based on those tags which you can then vote on if you like or dislike them. You’re also given results for books that match your search and you can vote on those as well. The goal is to train LeapTag so eventually you’ll always get results that are perfect for you and voting won’t be necessary.

One thing I couldn’t figure out was how to share your tags with friends. It’s not something I feel is important but on the “About LeapTag” page there’s a paragraph explaining the ability to invite people to join groups and allowing members to comment on votes etc. I couldn’t find any way to do that in this screencast so if someone figures it out, please let me know! Here’s my screencast tour of LeapTag:

Flash Demo 3m38s

Found on: TechCrunch